Saturday, March 19, 2011

MOR GABRIEL MONASTERY UPDATE: Hurriyet Daily Newsreports that the most recent European Parliament report on Turkey takes the Turkish Government to task for its treatment of this Syriac monastery:

The 25th paragraph of the report reads that the EP “finds the Turkish Supreme Court [of Appeals] decision against Mor Gabriel Monastery, concerning a land dispute with villages and the Turkish Treasury, to be regrettable.”

If Turkey is serious about wanting full membership in the EU, it needs to watch this sort of thing.

This volume treats surviving passages about Jews written from 333 B.C.E. - 63 B.C.E. by Gentile Greek authors. It provides remarkable depth to materials that, as a result of the format of previous commentaries and compendia, are often read as discrete, de-contextualized artifacts. It also challenges the prevailing scholarly narrative about these passages, claiming that there was little early admiration of the Jews and no steady increase in its opposite in response to historical events.

One of this work’s virtues, its insistence that “no reference to the Jews in Hellenistic literature should be interpreted in isolation from its context” (p. 146), is closely tied to its principal flaw: its overconfident historical reconstruction of the context of each passage and frequent recourse to an argumentum ex silentio. The work also over-utilizes source criticism as a means to resolve difficulties in each passage rather than making reasonable efforts to consider these difficulties as the result of attempts by ancient historians and ethnographers to reconcile their esteemed sources with new information.

AMMAN - Arab experts on Wednesday took the first steps towards taking international legal action against Israel for ongoing excavations near the old city of Jerusalem.

[...]

The City of David Project seems particularly to be at issue. The claims that Israelis are excavating under the Al Aqsa Mosque keep being repeated, but I have never seen them substantiated. See, for example, here. While, on the contrary, the Waqf's illicit digging on the Temple Mount is well established. See, for example, here.

A plan to build a vacation village on part of an archaeological site in the Negev has locals up in arms.

By Ran Shapira (Haaretz)

Excerpt:

Yehuda D. Nevo, an archaeologist from Midreshet Sde Boker who excavated the site in the 1980s, found dozens of structures made of local stone in the streambed. His findings indicate the settlement dates back to the late Byzantine period (the 6th century, C.E. ), and was populated by Arab nomads. In contrast to the surrounding society, which became Christian between the 4th and 6th centuries C.E., he believed the inhabitants here remained pagans, before converting in the 7th century to Islam.

Nevo, who died in 1994, attributed ritual significance to the site, but the Israel Antiquities Authority rejects his interpretation. "This was a Muslim farming settlement from the 7th and 8th centuries C.E.," says Yoram Haimi, the organization's archaeologist for the southern district.

In this collection of previously published essays, Kraft presents a series of his most significant contributions to the methodological problems and possibilities of investigating Jewish texts that were transmitted, preserved, read and sometimes interpolated by Christian tradents. Part One examines ‘general context and methodology’ in five essays; the remainder of the book is devoted to specific studies of some texts from the so-called ‘pseudepigrapha’ (though Kraft wants to dispute the usefulness of the term), as well as particular problems in the Dialogue of Timothy and Aquila, Pliny the Elder, Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus.

The Telegraph: Donny GeorgeDonny George, who died on March 11 aged 60, was an Iraqi archaeologist who, following the 2003 invasion, fought a brave battle to prevent looters ransacking the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, then led efforts to recover thousands of stolen artefacts.

It started with Tunisia and spread all across the region. Overthrowing dictators seems to be on the agenda, and while civilians fight for their freedom, the cultural treasures of their countries are in danger.

Xu Long, head chef at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, has literally written the book on Israeli coins.

One of the most passionate collectors of Israeli coins is the head chef in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. When Xu Long isn’t cooking Peking duck for visiting heads of state, he devotes his time to researching the history of Jewish coins.

It took him 10 years of painstaking study, but last November Xu Long published a 575-page hard-back on the subject, Money of Ancient Judea and Israel.

Ironically, his book, which is in Mandarin, is one of the most wide-ranging on the subject in any language.

“His book starts with the first coins ever minted in Judea during the Persian period in the fourth century BCE and goes up to the Jerusalem of Gold 24-carat bullion coin launched last year by the Bank of Israel,” says Arthur Boxer, CEO of the Israel Coins and Medals Corporation (ICMC). “He explains the story behind each coin.”

Prof. Shmuel Marco of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences and his colleagues have invented a new tool which he describes as a “fossil seismograph,” to help geophysicists and other researchers understand patterns of seismic activity in the past.

Inspired by a strange “wave” phenomenon he studied in disturbed sediment in the Dead Sea region, Prof. Marco says the new tool, developed with input from geologists and physicists, is relevant to areas where earthquakes affect bodies of water, like the West Coast of the United States. It also can help engineers understand what’s at risk when they plan new hydroelectric power plants. The new research was published in the journal Geology.

A TRAVEL PIECE ON QUMRAN is the first installment of a new column in the Jerusalem Post by Wayne Stiles. The column is standard media Qumran fare: substantially accurate but exaggerates the support for the Massoretic Text among the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. But it's odd that a Jerusalem Post columnist thinks the English spelling of the site is "Kumran."

Then on March 3, the Egyptian press reported that 30 truckloads of antiquities had been moved for safekeeping from the Qantara storage facilities to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Included were “Sinai artifacts that were retrieved from Israel following the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.”

So we now know where they are. Whether they will ever be exhibited in Egypt is another question. (Wouldn’t it be nice if they were lent for exhibition to an Israeli museum?) And what steps, if any, are being taken to conserve these fragile, faint and delicate drawings and inscriptions?

It is an inference that the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions are among these 30 truckloads of antiquities, but a reasonable one. I hope that they turn up and prove to be undamaged. And that they really are published this year.

JOURNAL OF A UFO INVESTIGATOR, by David Halperin, is reviewed by Bill Eichenberger in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Excerpt:

To enjoy "Journal of a UFO Investigator" one must not only suspend disbelief; it helps to be open to the question: What is reality? Mr. Halperin's novel is as much a philosophic treatise as it is a voyage through fantastical worlds.